Date of completion:
1 Jan 2027
Integrated Water Management Plan
Designing & Implementing an Integrated Water Management plan in Nakivale Refugee camp, Uganda.
As part of the larger ‘Regenerative Settlement Project’ in Rubondo, Nakivale, 5 workshops were undertaken to better understand the land and the daily lives of the people who will live in the settlement and collaboratively create a masterplan for the site.
Despite an abundance of seasonal rain water, a major theme coming again and again from the participants was the daily struggle to access water. There are limited sources of all types of water - for drinking, cooking, washing and irrigating crops.
To respond to the challenge, this project, led by local regenerative organisation YICE and Fluxus Ecological design, will design and implement a Water Sensitive Design and Integrated Water Management plan.
The plan will cover:
Demand reduction: minimising water consumption to essential levels
Source diversification: combining multiple water sources of varying quality and seasonal availability
Rainwater management: promoting infiltration and retention to enhance groundwater recharge and reduce runoff and erosion
Wastewater as a resource: recovering water, nutrients and energy whenever possible
In practice, on this site, this means harvesting and filtering rainwater from roofs for immediate access to water and digging earthworks to retain rain water in the soil to rehydrate the land and humidify the environment over time.
Initial planning has identified the following approaches as appropriate for this site:
Ensuring dry sanitation systems are used, such as UDDTs, to reduce consumption of water
Rain water harvesting, filtering and storage from roofs of the 20 houses that will be built on site, for household and communal access.
Water retention to channel water from rain, run-off and grey water into the soil on the site using banana circles, rain gardens, swales, bunds and ponds.
Digging a shallow well at the source of a seasonal spring for community access
An initial visit and workshop has been undertaken to research the approach further and trial rainwater harvesting on a building on the site and an action plan produced to guide the project.
See a video about the first workshop here:
